There have been countless articles on the marketing trends of 2020, full to the brim with analytics, statistics and big words…
They are relevant and exciting, however they can be very long, you want to know the trends quickly so you can start applying them immediately and see some juicy results right?
So let’s get trendy right now, don’t miss the boat, read this article!
1. Customer experience
The customers experience, in Kulea’s opinion, is the most important trend this year… especially with customer knowledge, technology and expectation as high as ever!
Buying into this trend is going to help every aspect of your business, from consumer interest, purchasing, right through to retention and advocacy. Your customers experience will determine the results you get in 2020.
How?
Personalisation is key, your customers and prospects simply expect you to know about them. Make your touch points as subtly personal as possible, their name in an email, in a subject line, reference their company name where possible. You can even go one further and use software to automatically show this personal information on your landing pages from your CRM information.
Next is the importance of timing:
You can be as personal as you want, but throwing marketing at people without listening to their needs can severely dampen the effects of getting their name right…
You can use your CRM and marketing research to a point here, knowing who you are sending what to can help tailor the description of the product/service (e.g are you addressing a senior or junior audience?)
An incredibly effective tool however is marketing automation, doing what it says on the tin, MA can ‘listen’ to the behaviours of your audience, through their email interactions and web activity, and send out automated marketing based on that!
For example, whether a recipient ignores your email or interacts with it, the next email should be different… if a prospect clicks on a certain page on your website, an automatic email should be sent to them (not too quickly) highlighting the benefits of that interest whist still fresh in their minds.
(Yes, Kulea.ma does do all of this, and it is much easier than you think!)
2. Customer retention
This brings us nicely to customer retention, which is becoming increasingly important and is often overlooked.
According to Harvard Business, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one (the value of keeping the right customers) and there’s not much more to add to this one, its damn important that you keep your current customers happy – they are keeping your business alive, they are your army of influencers…
Tell me more…
As well as the aforementioned tips, we feel that value added content is important in keeping your existing customers interested and feeling the love. Value added emails can be the perfect way to pop yourself back into the mind of a customer, educating without selling, and keeping you top of their list for any cross selling opportunities.
(check out our article on Value added marketing here)
*if you are using marketing automation here, you will have your customer information in your CRM and each time they interact with an email or your website, an alert can be sent to your sales team to connect with them!
Another thing to remember…
…is to make sure you reward and don’t punish. Are you sending out alluring offers to your new prospects? Don’t forget those loyal customers. A few effective ways to do this are sending out offers for up/cross selling opportunities (in a timely fashion mind), renewal/loyalty offers and recommendations and advocate sales rewards… if they do the work, they get the cheese, yah?
3. Cross department interaction
From the above we can clearly see that the customer journey runs far deeper than the marketing department. All departments within a business are a crucial part to the buyer puzzle and communication between them is key.
The relationship between the sales and marketing team are in our view the ultimate dream team. Both departments will understand your customer in unique ways and can seriously help each other with targeting communication.
Your marketing team are the experts in your industry, they’re clued up on what is hot and what is not right now, whilst your sales team knows what it takes to get that conversion booked in and what turns the prospect off.
So what now?…
It’s time to get your diaries out and get some regular meetings booked in! Get an overview of the company goals and get to grips with how each department views your customers/prospects, and you will soon see what is working and what could be improved.
Marketing automation can really help here (yeah, we know, but we are a marketing automation solution after all!). It doesn’t take long at all to set up some simple journeys that listen and respond to your customer’s needs, and set up to alert the sales team when engagement thresholds are met.
Read more about how Marketing Automation can really make a difference here!
4. Video (killed the radio star)
80’s pop references aside, video is massive and you need to get involved now!
Here are some amazing statistics from the latest Wyzowl Video Marketing Report:
94% of video marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.
84% of marketers say video has helped them increase traffic to their website.
81% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads.
80% of marketers say video has increased dwell time on their website.
41% of marketers say that video has helped them reduce support calls.
I needn’t say more, it is a fantastic way to improve your marketing this year. Make the most of tools such as YouTube and ScreenCastify to show off your product and services visually.
But what shall we record?
Anything and everything you would like to show off to your prospects and customers, for example:
- Job of the week (if you’re in recruitment, why not get one of your reps to record the post they are most excited about, what the candidate needs and how to apply)
- Tips and tricks of your trade, give that all important value added content.
- New product launches, don’t just tell them, show them!
- Your sales pitch, ditch the traditional wordy email for a short clip of the sales team showing the demo.
The possibilities are endless.
5. Voice search
Do you Hey Google much? Regardless of whether you do, a growing number of the population used the technology within their device to verbally search the internet for answers last year and that is expected to rise year on year.
Top 10 Voice search stats (according to quoracreative.com)
The Echo Dot was crowned as the best-selling product on Amazon in the 2018 holiday season.
Grocery shopping accounts for more than 20% of voice-based orders
Voice-based shopping is expected to jump to $40 billion in 2022
In market share, this means consumer spending via voice assistants is expected to reach 18% by 2022
By 2024, the global voice-based smart speaker market could be worth $30 billion.
60% of smartphone users have tried voice search at least once in the past 12 months.
55% of teenagers are using voice search daily basis.
In terms of accuracy, Google Home is the winner so far by answering 81% of the queries correctly, on average.
More than 20% of voice search queries are triggered by a combination of only 25 keywords
Top 3 common keywords in voice search phrases are “how”, what” and “best”
(source: 75 Voice Search Technology Statistics And Trends)
How do you get involved??
It’s time to add voice search into your digital marketing strategy. Getting your content optimised for voice search isn’t as hard as it sounds. There are plenty of tips and tricks on the web (Alexa, search voice optimisation)
Here’s Singlegrain.com’s 5 Steps to Opimize your Content for Voice Search To get you started.
6. Martech
Martech is on the rise, and has been for a few years (Scott Brinker’s supergraphic says it all), however it’s becoming increasingly difficult to decide who to use and what to do. Let’s start by asking why bother in the first place?… Marketing technology is developed to make marketing lives easier, make marketing more effective and convert more customers. Simple.
What to do…
It’s digital transformation time… and this needs cross department analysis and forward planning.
You can purchase a whopping great package with a Martech giant who claims to cover every inch of your marketing technology needs, whether you need it or not, but you may just find yourself at the mercy of a ‘Jack of all, master of none’ with a very long contract.
Consider creating your own Best of Breed stack of technology software solutions from the results of your Martech meeting… the huge choice of technology out there may be very confusing to start with, but it does provide you with a sweet shop of options so you don’t have to be chained to one company and you only pay for what you need.
Cherry pick what you need through the medium of integration! (we recommend Zapier – it’s brilliant!)
Our Co-Founder Andrew is incredibly passionate about the perfect Martech Stack, please feel free to drop him any questions you might have about where on earth to start: andrew@kulea-ma.stackstaging.com, no sales pitch here, just friendly advice x
7. A.I
This anagram has been thrown around willy-nilly for so many years but is set to come in strong this year. It’s meaning often miss-used, Artificial Intelligence, is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans (according to Techopedia). it is NOT marketing automation (Which automates your marketing FYI)
Ok, so how do you get involved?
Jumping on the A.I bandwagon can seem daunting (and costly) however it doesn’t have to be. One effective example of A.I you can starting using right now is a Chatbot! These enable your prospects and customers to ‘talk’ to your company at any time of the day or night.
Rather than wait for your opening times or scour through how-to guides and FAQ, the chatbot will have a back and fourth dialogue with the user in your company’s ‘tone of voice’.
Influencermarketinghub.com has some great Information and their 10 Best AI Chatbot Platforms for 2020 here.
A.I is not to be used to take over the human touch as we speak about next, but to open your business up beyond the 9-5 time perimeters.
8. Human touch
And finally, with all this talk of automation, personalisation and artificial intelligence. The necessity for the human element is huge this year…
Although the customer wants to be able to communicate with you at all hours of the day from any time zone, they want their name in every email and they expect you to know what they want before they do… they are becoming increasingly wise to your use of technology and don’t want to ‘become a number’ in your impressive martech stack.
Sooooo, on top of everything we’ve discussed so far…
This means your employees are as important as they have ever been. How you incorporate your technology into your business is important, but it’s there to enhance the employee and customer journey… not deceive them or not take over you human roles.
How?
Customer success is as crucial to your business as your front of house sales, and the brains behind your marketing. Taking customer service up a level from reactive to proactive, your customer success team can work blissfully with your technology and make sure your customers remain satisfied and nurtured, at every stage of their buying cycle.
If you’d like to know more, Mindtouch.com has a great guide to Customer Success here.
There we have it, 8 of the big trends of this year… if you have any questions or comments then please do not hesitate to get in touch!
